Análisis de la información y conclusiones

Like Bennett, Ingold describes the world as consisting of individual things which cannot be untangled from their relations with others and the environment they are part of. Ingold describes the world as a “meshwork” of “interwoven lines” of human and nonhuman relations (italics in original, 60). Ingold uses three simple line-based diagrams to explain how everything is a relation: a closed circle; a squiggly line (69); and a tangle of numerous lines spindling out from a central source (70). The outline of a closed-circle represents a view of the world where everything is contained within itself, disconnected and “against a surrounding world” (70). The singular line details things of the world as trails of movement, and the multiple spindly line diagram shows the things of the world as “extend[ing] along not one but multiple trails” (70). For Ingold, the world is this final diagram because living things are not closed off from the environment they are in; rather, they flow through as always-moving lines.

of their involvement in the world” (Ingold 70). For Ingold, then, there is no “boundary” to organisms and therefore no surrounding environment (70) but, rather,

lines of growths issuing from multiple sources [that] become

comprehensively entangled with one another, rather like the vines and creepers of a dense patch of tropical forest, or the tangled root systems that you cut through with your spade every time you dig in the garden. (71)

The world as “meshwork” for Ingold is a “tangle” of organisms and

environments. These things as multiple entangled relations see the world as flux because everything is moving along their multiple paths, affecting each other’s paths continually.

Pickering, from a science and technology perspective, uses the term “mangle” to consider scientific practice as a “dance” of “resistance and accomodation” between scientists and the “material agency” of the world, resonating with Ingold’s “meshwork” as a tangle between human, nonhuman, and environmental relations. For Pickering, the world is “filled … with agency” of “continually doing things” that “bear upon us … as forces of material beings” (italics in original, 6). An example Pickering provides to show how the world is made up of forces that constantly do is the weather. For Pickering, weather is a material agent because conditions such as “winds, storms, droughts, floods, heat and cold … engage with our bodies as well as our minds, often in life-threatening ways” (6). These conditions are “life-threatening” because if we did not have buildings, clothing, and heating, “one would die quite quickly” (6). Weather conditions, then, provide an example of a force “continually doing things” because these conditions constantly change (Pickering, italics in original, 6). Further, as these shifts cannot be isolated from the things they affect, such as the ability for grass to grow, lakes to flow, and animals to drink, the weather is a material agent. For Pickering, these emergent relations between things “doing things” (italics in original, 6) is a “dialectic of resistance and accomodation” (xi). These dialectics of things adapting and changing with each other, for Pickering, are the patterns of the world (xi).

Similarly, Ingold uses the weather as an example of the world as “meshwork”. He notes that “weather is dynamic, always unfolding, ever changing in its currents, qualities of light and shade, and colours, alternately damp or dry, warm or cold”

(73). Further, he notes how the weather affects moods, motivations, movements, and possibilities of subsistence of everything making its way “through” the world, sculpting and eroding the “surfaces upon which inhabitants tread” as well (Ingold 73). So, because weather always changes and in doing so affects the many things which move through the world in various ways, we can consider the patterns of the sky and the earth as made up of relations that change and adapt to each other constantly and continually in indeterminate ways.

In Ingold’s thinking about the world as “meshwork” and Pickering’s as “mangle” lie affinities with how I describe multilinearity as fragments with multiple soft relations. Take a clip which shows a sequence of sunset-lit pink clouds from Sometimes I See Palm Trees as an example, where “colour” and “light” have been attributed as “in” and “out” keywords. What this keywording means is any clip with “colour” or “light” as an “out” keyword can find this clip as a thumbnail, and this pink-cloud clip searches for any clips with “colour” or “light” as “in” keywords to become available in the three thumbnail positions. As there are 13 clips with “colour” as an “in” keyword and 42 clips with “light” as an “in” keyword, then there should be 57 possible clips that this pink-clouds clip can find. However, because a clip in a K-film cannot search for itself and there are seven clips which have “colour” and “light” as “in” keywords, we must subtract eight from this total, meaning that this pink-cloud clip searches for 47 other clips and there are 49 other clips which can find this clip. If I was going to draw a diagram of this clip, I would draw 49 lines coming into a point from the left and 47 lines emerging out towards the right as visualised in figure 20. Each clip in Sometimes I See Palm Trees could be drawn in this way and if linked together in a diagram would appear entangled.

In this way, a clip which is a sequence in a K-film is multiple because it is made up of different views; it then has multiple possible connections both in and out so, while it always remains granular, it is always entangled in its relations with other clips as well. What the clips in Sometimes I See Palm Trees look and perform like are the “multiple trail” entangled lines of Ingold’s “meshwork”, “extend[ing] along not one but multiple trails, issuing from a source” (70). The interfaces of my K-films further evoke this entanglement of granular things as each playing video always appears in a line, in equal size, with three thumbnail options. It can be argued that the soft multiple relations which take place between clips and the reinforcing interface design allow my K-films to perform the world as Ingold’s “meshwork”.

End

I have found that an implication of the list, as a way of making non-narrative multilinear nonfiction in Korsakow, is a priming towards noticing the unnoticed. The modernist avant-garde, Benning’s eco-aesthetics, Tsing’s and Stewart’s precarity, Gibson’s “changescape”, Bennett’s “impossible singularity”, Ingold’s “meshwork”, and Pickering’s “mangle” all provide lenses through which to understand this practice. What all these ways of thinking about the world do is see the world as made up of dynamic individual things in entangled relations. From a nonfiction film perspective, these dynamic things are the rhythms of rain Ivens searches for in Amsterdam and the skies which Benning watches with his camera in Ten Skies. Although Benning’s oeuvre is highly consistent and Ivens’s is much more variable (although he does return to weather and climate often), what I came to realise is that Ivens searches the world for the multiple ways rain appears in Amsterdam, whereas Benning to a greater degree lets patterns materialise in his films. My iterative process, which lets unnoticed visual aesthetic qualities feed into the project and then out to shape the way I notice the world, is one that explores how patterns are found in the relationship between myself, the phone camera, Vine as an app, and the Korsakow software.

From here, I came to realise that this way to think about the world in fragments and multiple soft relations resonates with posthuman ways of thinking about the

world as precarious, fluxing, changing, and mesh-like. Stewart, Tsing, Gibson, Ingold, and Pickering think about the world as made up of dynamic things which are always changing and affecting their relations with other things. Listing in order to notice the unnoticed as a non-narrative mode of interactive filmmaking performs the world as precarious, fluxing, and mesh-like, because the things of the world are drawn attention to both as individual and relational things which change indeterminately in a dance between what the clips show, how they have been programmed, what the Korsakow software provides, and what the user notices. While this chapter has focused primarily on how the process of making invites a posthuman thinking about the world, what I will consider next is what these K-films do as machines which perform fragments and soft relations, and how this offers an ecocritical practice.

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